Fed gaming panel under fire for way it holds meetings

Friday, April 30, 1999 | 11:47 a.m.

Facing a staff shakeup and struggling to meet a June report deadline, the National Gambling Impact Study Commission again is coming under fire for not following federal guidelines to conduct its business in the open.

Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., said today the nine-member panel violated federal open meeting and disclosure laws this week in Washington, when it held two closed personnel sessions without properly notifying the public and failed to make copies available of a much-skewered draft report.

"This tells me that we've got to watch them very closely and press the point that they have to be more open and comply with the law," Bryan told the Sun this morning.

The latest reported violations, which Bryan said the commission has acknowledged committing, come on the heels of a General Accounting Office report released this month that chastises the panel for not following open meeting guidelines laid out in the Federal Advisory Commission Act.

Bryan, an outspoken critic of the commission during its two-year tenure, had asked for the GAO report.

Late Thursday, following an inquiry from the Sun, Bryan issued a news release again condemning the commission.

"This behavior is offensive to taxpayers and Congress," Bryan said in the release. "It also casts suspicions on why they continue to ignore open meeting and public information laws, especially when they have been repeatedly told to follow them."

The closed sessions this week, knowledgeable sources said, were held to discuss concerns that the panel's staff was doing a poor job of writing the report, which must be delivered to Congress, the president and the nation's governors by June 18.

At a secret meeting Wednesday, the sources said, commissioners urged Chairwoman Kay James to relieve Deputy Director John Shosky of his duties of overseeing the report's preparation and replace him with Research Director Douglas Seay.

Executive Director Timothy Kelly could not be reached in Washington today to confirm whether the shakeup has occurred and respond to Bryan's latest attacks.

But sources said that Shosky has indeed left the commission, which also is paying as much as $100,000 to a Washington consulting firm to help write the report.

Questions, meanwhile, also have been raised about whether the commission discussed more than personnel matters at its closed session on Wednesday.

After the session concluded, James re-convened the public meeting and said the panel had decided to ad an extra meeting to its hectic 11th-hour schedule the first week in June in San Francisco. The commission also is scheduled to meet in Washington May 17-18.

The latest concerns over the way the commission has been conducting its business comes amid renewed internal dissension among panel members that flared up this week over a vote to recommend that communities across the country impose a moratorium on the expansion of gambling.

The 5-4 vote was opposed by the pro-gaming members of the panel -- Terry Lanni, Bill Bible and John Wilhelm -- all of whom suggested they now were considering putting together a minority report that better reflected their views about the evidence collected during the two-year gambling study.

Congress has given the commission $5 million to look at the social and economic impact of gambling across the country.

During the public meetings this week, the commission appeared disorganized and lacking direction under the weight of the June 18 deadline.

Bible likened the panel to a "symphony without a conductor," and Wilhelm criticized the staff for not including anything about the economic benefits gambling brings to a community. The panel heard much evidence on that subject during its travels around the country.

Even Commissioner James Dobson, a fierce gambling critic, rapped the staff for not including many of the panel's recommendations about pathologic gambling in the draft.